So What Really Is In A
McDonald's Chicken McNugget?Chicken McPoison
Author unknown
5-14-7

The
Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a fascinating book that details
the changing eating habits of Americans. I can't recommend it highly enough.
It explains how, over the last 30 years, we have become a nation that eats
vast quantities of corn ­ much more so than Mexicans, the original "corn
people."

Most folks assume that a chicken nugget is just a piece
of fried chicken, right? Wrong! Did you know, for example, that a McDonald's
Chicken McNugget is 56% corn?

What else is in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget? Besides
corn, and to a lesser extent, chicken, The Omnivore's Dilemma describes
all of the thirty-eight ingredients that make up a McNugget ­ one of
which I'll bet you'll never guess. During this part of the book, the author
has just ordered a meal from McDonald's with his family and taken one of
the flyers available at McDonald's called "A Full Serving of Nutrition
Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You."

These two paragraphs are taken directly from The Omnivore's
Dilemma:

"The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot
of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight
ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be
derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to
bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers,
which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another
emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing
leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter);
cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn
oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part
in the nugget: There's some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the
hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than
corn, depending on the market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several
completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately
come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical
plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by
keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange
after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the "leavening
agents": sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium
acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to
keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning
rancid. Then there are "anti-foaming agents" like dimethylpolysiloxene,
added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules,
so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough
to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook
of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an
established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable.

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget
is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum
that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it
comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's
Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid)
the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise
no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just
as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea,
vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse."
Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill."